


Cassilda's Mantle

by AvatarofJord



Category: True Detective
Genre: Audrey Hart-centric, Carcosa Mythos, Eldritch Themes, Gen, M/M, Prophetic Visions, Rust/Marty is implied, Supernatural Elements, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-29 22:56:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19840246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvatarofJord/pseuds/AvatarofJord
Summary: Audrey Hart has always been a weird girl, sensitive and too wise.When she first sees Rust Cohle, he tastes like ash and aluminum, standing outside on her father’s stoop, drunk and holding yellow flowers. There are spirals in his eyes and she wants to show him the drawing she made, because it’s for him. She knew it was for him even before she saw him. Her mother hung it on the wall like a devotional.





	Cassilda's Mantle

**Author's Note:**

> So True Detective is one of those shows that i do a rewatch of the first season annually. And i love it. Its a great story. and one of my favorite things is all the little easter eggs that are hidden through the show, the references to the "Carcosa" mythos and source materials. its excellent. the owl in the tree in the church, the yellow sign. black stars. all of it. Another thing i loved was the kind of bait and switch they did with Audrey. The whole time i kept expecting something aweful for her, or something weird. and then there was nothing. just a girl with a tense relationship with her father. So i wanted to explore her from a different angle as well as play with some of the source material myself. Boom this little fic was born. I started it years and years ago. and now its finished.

Audrey Hart has always been a weird girl, sensitive and too wise. 

When she first sees Rust Cohle, he tastes like ash and aluminum, standing outside on her father’s stoop, drunk and holding yellow flowers. There are spirals in his eyes and she wants to show him the drawing she made, because it’s for him. She knew it was for him even before she saw him. Her mother hung it on the wall like a devotional. 

In 95 she chooses to wear the crown to keep it from her sister. Cheap plastic and sporting pink streamers, it doesn’t feel exactly right. A tad too manufactured and not enough connected to the swampy earth that birthed her. But it’s a first step, a first acknowledged choice. She throws it in a tree and she knows Dora Lange also chose her crown.

There will be many other choices, always to the right, along a winding catacomb, beckoned by a force she couldn’t possibly understand. Predestination.

In 2012, when she goes to see her father in his hospital bed it’s with the same sense of fate that has surrounded every aspect of her life. She knows about the Yellow King, she’s college educated, took a science fiction lit class where every page of Chambers had smelled like her dad’s old squad car and black stars had bled at the edges of the pages. It was the first time she hadn’t needed reading assignments to drink down every word like it was the _Water of Life._ By the time she’d written her last paper on Carcosa, those black stars had started to bleed into her paintings too.

She hates her meds because they dull her senses but she takes them because she doesn’t know how she could live through the visions the way Rust did. He doesn’t need to tell her he has them, she knows. His may have come from years of drugs and undercover work, but Audrey’s come from someplace else. Perhaps it’s the same place, a dead city in a lost galaxy. The Song of the Hyades resonating on an intergalactic frequency that the both of them can pick up on. It’s just after her father breaks Rust out of the hospital that the Song crests, and when she looks outside that evening, after a phone call with her mother, the moon it isn’t alone in the sky anymore. Instead of taking her little pill that night, she dumps them all down the drain. She can see beyond the constellations

She can see the circle that they will take, her father and Rust. can see how it never ends and repeats. Knows that, even as she hated it, her father was never gonna walk that path with her mother. Probably for the best. Her father has always been the blind man, an heir who hasn’t yet found the book, let alone read the pages. He wouldn’t have made it without Rust. And Rust, well, she doesn’t need her mother to tell her that her father and Rust are _living together_ to know what is really going on. Historically, royalty tends to keep it in the family, and Rust and Marty have been sworn brothers in blood for nigh on a decade. Now, that the first battle is won she can see the next one the horizon.

She gets in her car that same evening, doesn’t tell her boyfriend and drives all night to her father’s house in Louisiana. She’s only been once, and it had tasted like despair, a sort of petrichor where all the land was rotting. 

Rust is the one who answers the door, pale and bruised and still holding a hand to his cleaved stomach and the taste of aluminum and ash explodes in Audreys mouth like a ripe cherry. He doesn’t look like a King, not yet. 

She congratulates him anyway and he scowls at her, pupils contracting and dilating rapidly.

“The King in Yellow is dead, Erol Childress is dead.” Rust says, voice raspy and Audrey wonders what he sees over her shoulder that he keeps glancing away from her. The lilting chime of the Song has never been clearer than it is at this moment. She smiles. Behind the house the sky is burning.

“King is a title, not a man. Titles are earned and won. You were a Stranger before, but now Carcosa is on the horizon.” She stops, and tucks a long blonde strand of hair behind her ear. “The sacrifices are made. You. You laid a life upon the altar. You saw the portal didn’t you?”

“You can’t know this.”

“You tilled the earth. You built the traps. You laid with your sister. And you sacrificed at the altar. You’re in Carcosa, you can never leave.” 

“Audrey…” Rust’s fear tastes like a copper penny, and if she didn’t know better Audrey would say she could hear his heart beating in his chest, a trapped bird beating a staccato of denial against his rib cage. It’s disappointing, for all his nihilistic insight, it doesn’t appear that Cohle was anymore aware of the path than her father. The ignorance isn’t a mask.

“You never read it did you? All those mouths that spoke his name, and you never read it.” She can’t help the laugh. “That’s fine, I brought you mine.” She hands him her copy of Robert W. Chambers “The King in Yellow”, kept tucked behind her back the entire time. She doesn’t point out the folded pages of Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa", tucked in the front. “Don’t be afraid. I’ve seen the twin suns rise, and it’s good Rust. It’s real good.”

She runs a hand along his arm. She’s said everything that needs saying, for good or ill, it’s all in Rust’s hands now. As she leaves she lets her cardigan drop and hang off her arms, exposing the low back of her indigo sundress and, judging by the half strangled gasp she hears leave Rust’s mouth, the tattoo that’s inked directly between her shoulder blades.

Marty won’t be home until later, too late, Audrey will be long gone from the house. All the same there’s an uneasy feeling when he walks in the door. The sound of sobbing from the end of the hall only compounds it. When he enters the bedroom where Rust should be laid up, recovering, napping and instead finds him crying he’s not exactly sure what to do. He’s done some therapy, a few sessions, but most emotional outbursts still vex him. And Rust has been a powder keg since putting all the bullshit with Childress to rest.

He takes the book from his companions lap and looks at what has Rust so upset. It’s a paperback book of unknown origin, but sitting between the pages, brightly colored and vaguely familiar is a spiral drawing, with Audrey’s crayon signature at the bottom. Across from it, printed on the page the final lines of a story….

_"And now I heard his voice, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light, and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in Yellow whispering to my soul: 'It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!'"._


End file.
